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AskEMH - Q
#askEMH - Q&A Chat #4 '''is the fourth video in the post-ARG beyondEMH series, in which the creators Jeff, Vinnie and Evan answer questions tweeted to the @beyondEMH twitter acount. YouTube Description Our fourth installment of the post-game Q&A! Laughs are had and Vin is rage-fueled by coffee.J #eightyearsofEMH @beyondEMH on twitter: http://twitter.com/beyondemh @everymanhybrid on youtube: http://youtube.com/everymanhybrid Source thread for these and where to ask further questions: https://twitter.com/beyondEMH/status/... Further links: Jeffrey's Patreon: https://patreon.com/jeffreykoval Evan's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/zombielovejuice Vin's Patreon (Ritterhaus): https://www.patreon.com/ritterhaus Questions and answers In progress - transcribing sporadically. '''Was there every any promotion of any kind for this series, or did it all come from word of mouth? (1:04) Jeff: It's a good question, but- Vince: Let me think a second. Evan: That's... guerilla editing. (Vince laughs) Jeff: Guerilla marketing. Vince: Guerilla marketing. Evan: Guerilla marketing. Jeff: You were close. But. V: Yeah, but did we really though? E: Didn't you? J: We did with, like... Once the ball started rolling, we thought it was fun to like, sort of screw with people. E: I remember a DVD left in Princeton. That's what I remember. V: Right. So, Evan't right, Evan said guerilla marketing and he's sorta ha- E: Guerilla marketing. V: -half right, because we did at one point throw- E (at Jeff): The cards. V: -business cards around, and we threw one DVD, with... (to Jeff) Did we ever release that anywhere else? J: What was it? V: That specific edit of videos? J: Was it just for, like, a video we uploaded? V: No, we didn't upload it. We put it on that DVD and stuck it there. J: No, but that would be good to... if we could re-find that. J: Oh, that might have been in- V: I can't- J: The hard drive incident? V: Yep. Yep. But basically, I think we really just did that because we thought it was fun to build the world. So we weren't thinking in our minds, "Oh shit, we need to get more people to watch." It was just, how fucked up would it be if we found a DVD under a... E: And that's- yeah, cos, cos I wouldn't... And that's what Jeff was saying, like, like Jeff would come back and be like "Oh, I hid the business cards in the library", and (to Jeff), you were going through different books and putting them inside of books, which is awesome, ''but I certainly didn't expect people to actually come and watch it- V: It was just a nice easter egg. E: Yeah! But like what you said, if I found something, I'd be like, (''excited) "You guys!" Like, "What is this shit?!" And like, that's a cool way... J: It was one of those things that like, especially early on, like with interactions with GreenFeathers, it's like, we could upload a video explaining the story purpose to everbody, straight to the channel, but I think that there were moments where it was like, just so much cooler if you could screw with just one ''person... V: Yeah. J: Or, you know, just have the story, put it on ''their shoulders- V: Make it personal, right. J: -to tell everybody else. That was kinda cool. V: You know what? So I guess that that was ''our marketing tactic: to select individuals to make them important in the story, and have them tell other people to watch. J: It was kinda like inklings of the ARG at first, and then it kinda became... like a parallel ARG to it. Vince: We wanted you (''points at camera) to be our billboards. E: Because it's been true to form of the whole thing that we've done where, like, even that we chose not to monetize, and that we chose to do music instead, we wanted... the... And I think I remember us saying ''this: the few people who ''are watching? We want them to be rewarded and we want them to have a great time. V: Yeah. E: And that was more, like... like, at the beginning, there weren't that many people at all, and the people that were from the beginning stayed with us the whole time, and we were like "Yeah! Fuck yeah! We love these b- fuck yes!" And that's what we wanted to build towards. J: We get like, nine-year friend anniversaries on Facebook now - oh well, 8 years- E: Because of this. V: Yeah. J: Because of people that maybe weren't even into it, but it was just kinda like... the environment at the time was kinda like... I always relate it to like, band in high school; it was kinda just like, everybody's involved around this same thing, and there's just like this built-in group of acquaintances you have from it. So, that's kinda getting away from the whole marketing aspect... V: Well, yeah, so to bring it back, I think the marketing was to create engaging content for a small group of people, hoping that those people would tell other people, because that's sort of the way the story ran. Um, this is a good... can I unveil?... First of all! Hold on, let me back up for two seconds here and just explain what the hell is happening. This video is gonna be dutch as fuck. J: Yeah... (laughs) V: We do not have a tripod that is functional right now, mine- E: Why do you have to be racist about it? V: Broke. (Quietly, tongue-in-cheek) Because we don't really like the Dutch... (looks around) Edit that out! We love the Dutch. E: I'm part Dutch. J:I kinda dig this though. V: That's the way it is. And last time we had Amanda hold it, but we ended up doing an hour and a half or whatever, so we're not making someone hold it. So it is a little skewed - we'll try to adjust it a bit in post. V: But to bring it back to marketing, I'm gonna unveil my favorite catch-phrase. My motto if you will. J: (laughs) Oh man. V: My motto has always been - and these two can back it up. Evan (at Jeff) Oh. Haha. V: Every time anybody gets too far off the rails, I go, "Fuck the fans." E: Yes, that is true. J: (laughing) He has said that more than once. E: He has said that multiple times, yes. "Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em." V: And the reason that I say "Fuck the fans" is- when I say that, I don't mean "Fuck the people who have stayed for nine years and watched us", I mean the people who found two videos are were like "I don't fucking get it! Explain it to me!" J: "This doesn't make sense!" V: Because that betrays that core group that we had built. That we wanted to spread the word. So when I said "Fuck the fans", I never meant fuck the people who actually watch our series and understand all of the facets; it's "Fuck the casual viewers", because these people- Evan (laughs): The "casual" viewers. V: -are the ones we're trying to market ourselves to. E: We wanted to... serve the elite. V: Yes! The one per cent! E: We wanted to serve the elite. J: The coastal elite in their ivory golden ? towers. E: Who we love the most. Jeff will attest. J: Yeah. E: That's his favorite demographic. Yeah no, I- J: That's where we get paid from, you know, it's undeground money.. (Vince laughs) E: That's why we're in this mansion right now. V: I was gonna say, that's why we can all afford to not live in our parents' homes. (Evan laughs; Vince 'cheers's the camera) E (laughs): Did you just "cheers" it? V: Cheers. E: So, yes, fuck the fans, I agree because I remember us talking about, like, "I don't wanna fucking spoon-feed them!" You know what I mean? If they're confused, if they don't know what's going on, if they don't know what the fuck's happening: good! You know what I mean? Fucking let 'em! J: That was the thing, it's not- V (smiling): Can we pause for two seconds? J: Yeah. E: No. Vince (pointing to right of camera): Is that a tripod? Is that a- J: Are you jacking me? V: Is that a motherfuckin'...Is that a tripod? (Vince moves to get the tripod.) Did someone leave a tripod at my house? J: Is that mine? V: It might be. It's definitely not mine. That's yours. J: I think that's mine. (Jeff laughs.) E: You dumb idiots. J: Heeeey, we'll be right back! (Cut) to transcribe V: Okay, where were we? J: Marketing and stuff. V: Yeah, we finished that. J: About you sending pleasantries to the fans. V: Yeah, fuck 'em. (pause) Give us money. Evan (laughing): "Give us money", is that what you said? Thirty thousand- fuck you and get thirty thousand of your fuck off friends to come over and give us money... V: Have we gotten money? Have we gotten any during this campaign? No-one wants a salad recipe? J: It's a hundred. (shrugs) V: Oh shit, thanks. That's really cool. J: But, um. Yeah, about the whole "casual viewer" thing. Casual viewers are fine. V: Yes. J: If people are gonna be - it's a confusing project to wrap your arms around. But the ones that were casual and vocally... not being critical, just being douchey about it.Those are the ones that got me... upsetti spaghetti. Like, fuck off. V: Right. Well, and, you know what, they're still welcome to view - this is way off of marketing so we'll tie it up - but for me, totally, we want them to view it, we want them to watch it, and if they enjoy it: great. But we can't go back and change the way that we do things to make sure everybody can understand, or wanna watch. J: That came up a few times in the series that we made decisions - I think for the better - things like, we were like, alright, in not so many words, let's hold their hands through this. We started that and then said, "Yo, fuck this", and then something better came from it. Like- V: That's when my motto was born. J: The Brooklyn video is the clearest example of that: we actually left in the intro of you sitting at the desk, looking at the papers, we were gonna do some "explaining". And like, we still tried to give, you know, give them outs with like, the update hub and stuff, when we were still in the "people aren't dying" phase. V: Oh yeah. Well, that's when we were trying to figure it out. J: Yeah. V: Marketing? Not so much. But the way that we put the story together was intentional to get you to tell your friends, to engage a couple people and have them engage a couple people, and have them engage a couple people. J: One last thing about the marketing - I almost don't wanna say it, because it's what we say "Stop doing" to everybody. Gamejacking and stuff. It's like, early, early on, two videos out, I would just drop this link on paranormal boards and stuff, or, you know, social media, but not say "Hey, something really weird is happening." It wasn't like anything was happening yet, so. I will never understand why, like, people post a link saying "Something weird has happened to my friend's YouTube channel", and like, no videos have been uploaded yet. It's like, well, you kinda just gave yourself away, buddy. But yeah, that was some early on "marketing" that we did, just trying to know we exist out there. Would you rather play Borderlands or Fallout franchise? (9:38) E: Handsdown the Fallout franchise. V: Fallout for me too. And I don't even like most of the Fallout games... Fallout New Vegas to me is the best in the series. But Borderlands is fun too. J: I have no dog in either of those races. I love the art from Borderlands, but I like the idea of Fallout a lot more. Just like, the whole world-building. Are there any scenes or events in the series that you wish had come out differently? (11:44) All: A lot. ... E: Oh, I'll tell you one thing: the scene that I hate out of the whole series - it's the worst scene ever and I don't know why people enjoyed it - was, when we were in Lambertville, the fucking Rake when I wore the tight? sex suit and I crawled across it. I was like, guys, that's the dumbest shit I've ever seen. And they were like, "It looks so good!" I'm like, it looks like hammered shit! J: You really didn't like that, yeah. E: It looks like me, zipped up in a fucking...in a sex suit going [noise] across... It looks terrible! Like, that's not scary! If I saw that in a horror movie, I'd be like, "I'm done. This is fucking stupid." Like, that's the monster? That's the thing I'm supposed to be scared of? It looks like I could punch him in the face. J: The Rake was kinda a secondary monster because we couldn't make him a prominent role that early on. I know what you mean though. E: And that's why I was like, I'd rather just not even have him. It looked terrible. So that was... I don't know if this is the right thing, cos I wouldn't say that I wanted it to come out looking differently; I wanted to just scorched earth that scene. I hated it. It's terrible. V: But look at it this way, from this angle: If we had the budget, if we had the skill, we would not have the Rake, like, crittering on a wall and then get outta there. E: Ok, I see what you mean. No, then absolutely, I think you're right. J: We had to deal with some shit like that, just because we were so, you know. In over our heads. ... V: For me, it was late-game ARG stuff, specifically the tapes. I think the tapes came out fine, um- E: Yeah, I think they came out really good... V: Buuut, there was more to it that we had to cut because we did the tapes fucking 3 times? J: The fact that we had to record them 2 or 3 times? Yeah. V: The tapes that you have are totally different - well, not totally different, there was a couple that I had saved - but were mostly different from the original tapes. J: I don't mean to disparage you, because the first time, you recorded, like, a half-hour to an hour solo Vinnie of survival... the Princeton Tapes were vastly... I don't think we even called them that at that point. V: Well cos that was, remember we had that literally the first entire side A of tape one was Vinnie totally fine. It was Vinnie going to group therapy, it was Vinnie moving to Princeton, it was Vinnie talking to his grandma...And then there was a slow build to that reveal of grandma's not real, the house isn't real, he's going... yeah. But like, that didn't happen cos we ran out of time. J: What I was getting at was: there's a whole version that doesn't exist, and when we scrapped it, I was like, we're not going to make you record another two hours by yourself. V: Yeah, there was no way. J: We were all busy, you were drained at that point, so we're like, let's take a step back and retool this. And personally, I... Princeton Tapes is one of my favorite parts of the entire - especially the non-video portion of the story, just because it had all of us being fun at certain points... It was just, it was fun to make, and I think, you know, if you [Vince] didn't go through hell to have nothing, you know, ultimately get screwed by the postal service, then that wouldn't have existed. So that was another example of us having to make do. ... How weird was it filming Jeff’s torture/death video? Did Jeff get nightmares? (19:45) How did you guys organize your crossovers? Any fun things happen behind-the-scenes? (22:45) Can you talk about the music you used in the series? Why did you chose the music you did? (26:40) Wrap-up (31:30) Transcript In progress. External links YouTube Video